Images

Hue and Contrast

This color view shows two of the largest craters on Saturn's icy moon Tethys: Odysseus in the northern hemisphere and Melanthius in the south. The moon's surface grows notably darker northward of the equator.

The horizontal stripes above the moon are the rings.

The view shows the side of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across), which always faces away from Saturn.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were composited to create this color view. The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 11, 2005, at a distance of approximately 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Tethys. The image scale is 12 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Tethys.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.